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By Harry Haun 7/24/12 8:00am

Features

Dramatists Guild Fund's 50th Anniversary Gala Honoring John Kander

Broadway Lyricist Sheldon Harnick Has a New Gig: Poems to Accompany His Wife’s New York Photographs

When composer Jule Styne passed away almost 20 years ago at age 88, his widow Margaret wistfully reasoned, “He just ran out of keys.” Lyricist Sheldon Harnick reached the same age April 30, and one can only hope—after watching him, one day last week, aggressively pursue an apathetic taxi up West 44th Street—that he never finds out.

“I’ve never been busier in my life,” the buoyant octogenarian had said just before his cab chase in an interview at Market Diner where he spent most of an hour in the future tense, with only a few forays down a very glamorous memory lane. Read More

By Kat Stoeffel 6/27/12 8:00am

Features

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Deadliest Klatsch: Nick Denton Gives Gawker’s Drive-By Peanut Gallery a Promotion

“When someone comes into your house and throws shit around, you get pissed,” Anna Holmes told The Observer. She was speaking in metaphor: The house was the Gawker Media women’s interest blog Jezebel, of which she was the founding editor; the someone was the blog’s commenters, a famously undisciplined crowd.

“If you open your front door to people they just act like jerks,” agreed former Gizmodo editor Joel Johnson. Now the managing editor of Animal NY, he favors abolishing comments sections altogether.

Blog proprietor Nick Denton has a different plan—he’s giving them the run of the place. The commenters are creating content, after all, just like the writers. What’s the difference?

“I want to erase this toxic Internet class system,” he told The Observer in a gmail chat.

“Nick has always loved to subtly and not so subtly insult his employees,” said Gawker writer John Cook. “He thinks of us as glorified commenters.” Read More

By Kat Stoeffel 6/06/12 8:30am

Features

Return to Gender: Persistent Byline Gap Prompts Pitching and Moaning (and Partying!)

The streets of Williamsburg saw an unusual uptick in sensible high heels last Tuesday evening, when a couple hundred journalists, writers and editors dressed in summer office casual filed out of the Bedford Avenue station and into the muggy front room of Public Assembly, forming a line out the door. They were there to attend a story-pitching clinic for female journalists, titled, somewhat preciously, “Throw Like a Girl.”

Once inside, they stood shoulder-to-shoulder, sipping beers, while New York Times reporter Amy O’Leary asked a panel of editors and writers to talk about moxie.

Why was it, Ms. O’Leary wondered, that as a young freelancer she had spent months refining every pitch while her male peers tossed off story proposals from every statistic or idea they encountered? Read More

By Nina Burleigh 3/14/12 7:30am

Features

(Illo: Fred Harper)

With Piggy-Loving Madam Cooling Her Heels in Rikers, Will Her Clients Get Off?

Just before Christmas last year, NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly hosted a small, cosmopolitan group of pretty young women in his office at 1 Police Plaza. Most were immigrants to the city, having come from Asia, Central America, Eastern Europe and around the United States. Because of the sensitive nature of what they would discuss, only two other officials were present—the NYPD’s chief counsel and the commanding officer in charge of vice.

The women spoke different languages but had at least one thing in common: they had all been brought to the city to labor in the sex industry. The non-natives’ first English words were “blow job” and “fuck.” Read More

By Kat Stoeffel 2/01/12 10:06am

Features

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The Man With Two Brians! Can NBC’s Personality Industry Save the Anchor from Irrelevance?

On a recent post-NFL season Monday night, 7.3 million people watched a remake of Hawaii 5-0. Another 6.7 million watched Castle, a crime procedural that’s safely avoided buzz for four seasons. A crowd less than half that size, 3.2 million, watched an American furniture manufacturer tearfully repent for outsourcing the family business, met a real-life moon colonist, and saw a chimpanzee flip through a children’s book. “They like to look at the pictures,” the voiceover explained.

They had landed on the three-month-old newsmagazine Rock Center, NBC’s prime time bid to recapture an audience for TV news by offering a looser format in which to showcase Brian Williams’s formidable charisma. Mr. Williams’s sensibility is so deeply ingrained in the programming that Rock Center executive producer Rome Hartman likes to say that, when it’s working, it feels like “Brian’s playlist.” Read More

By Kat Stoeffel 1/18/12 8:38am

Features

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Doyennes in Distress: Oprah and Martha, Queens of Daytime Empowerment, Unceremoniously Dethroned?

Martha Stewart spent her first five on-air minutes of 2012 doing damage control.

“I’m here to assure you that you will see me on television this fall,” she said, tossing her blond bob so it grazed the shoulders of a sheer pink blouse.

“Our show was not canceled,” she added with signature Yankee brusqueness. “What we’re trying to do is to figure out a new way to do our show, just to keep evolution occurring.” Read More

By Kat Stoeffel 9/02/11 12:14pm

Features

nylon

Nylon President Reports to Court This Month for Money Laundering Trial

Later this month, the longtime president of Nylon magazine, Don Hellinger, and its current chief financial officer, Jami Pearlman, will report to court for trial readiness. In February, US Attorneys charged them with money laundering and operating an illegal gambling business. They seek $44 million in forfeiture.

Judging from its pages, downtown New York is central to Nylon’s DNA. Its name was an amalgam of New York and London, and the magazine has operated out of a Greene Street loft since it launched in 1999. A September issue spread was shot at the city’s latest hipster enclave, Rockaway Beach. But the trial will take place in Philadelphia, Pa., where the crew of suits who cut its waifish writers’ checks have been devising scams and having run-ins with the Federal Trade Commission since before most Nylon readers were even born. Read More

By Azi Paybarah 7/26/11 7:56pm

Features

Rupert’s Post Game: His Royal Pie-ness Story on Page SShhh

No one in News Corp.’s New York headquarters knew quite what to do when the pie landed on Rupert Murdoch.

“The newsroom stopped,” said one person inside the Wall Street Journal offices at the time, where the hearing was being broadcast on the televisions in the bullpen.

Outside, two NYPD cars were parked directly opposite of the building’s main entrance on Avenue of the Americas, while a CNN reporter filmed a report with Mr. Murdoch’s flagship building in the background. Inside, Mr. Murdoch’s operations tried to carry on: Fox News ran the London hearing live, and the Journal reporters—upon recovering—prepared a front-page story for the next morning.

But the pie-stained moment—which included Mr. Murdoch’s wife, Wendi Deng, slapping the assailant, and his son, James, complaining to the police—was, in many ways, tailor-made for Mr. Murdoch’s favorite local outlet, the tabloid he had twice bought and most closely resembles the embodiment of his life’s work: Turning dry dispassionate reports of government bodies into dramatic, personal narratives of powerful men and business elites behaving badly. And yet, if any Murdoch news outlet had something resembling an emotional desire to protect the 80-year-old Australian on what he called the “most humble” day of his life, it was the New York Post, the money-losing property that has long felt like a physical extension of its doting owner. The Post ran the story on page 35. Read More

By Laura Kusisto 6/07/11 9:00pm

Features

Mentor and prodege.

Unmasking Three Mismatched Heavies Who Won and Lost the Drake

In the early summer of 2008, Arthur G. Cohen rode the elevator to Harry Macklowe’s 21st-floor office in the G.M. Building wearing a black suit and bright pink dress shirt. Mr. Macklowe, sporting navy blue pinstripes and a multibillion-dollar real estate empire under siege, signed away his beloved Drake Hotel site to an enterprise called CMZ for $850 million.

CMZ is one of the more bizarre development teams ever assembled in the city, yet its existence has remained hidden until now from all but a handful of insiders. One-time top developer Mr. Cohen joined Washington lobbying czar Paul Manafort and Brad Zackson, a scrappy former righthand man to Fred Trump Sr., in a baffling boom-time enterprise. They looked at billions of dollars’ worth of properties such as the Drake, the Manhattan House, the Helmsley Hotel and two Bahamian islands—but with some of the world’s best real estate almost in their grasp, they never bought a single trophy property. Read More